Paris, (AFP) - Iran is witnessing a security campaign punctuated by executions in unprecedented numbers for years, mass arrests of opponents of the regime, some of which targeted a number of the most prominent film directors, and trials of foreign citizens that were denounced by their families as sham.

And it seems that none of the segments of society was spared from the grip of the authorities, according to activists, as the campaign affected activists in labor unions and others who oppose forcing women to wear the veil, as well as followers of religious minorities.

This coincides with the passage of a year since President Ibrahim Raisi, the former head of the judiciary, who is considered a hardline conservative, assumed power to succeed Hassan Rouhani, who is considered more moderate.

Raisi and the Islamic Republic's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, are grappling with an economic crisis that has come with a string of disasters, including a fatal building collapse in Abadan in May that sparked infrequent demonstrations.

Most of the economic problems are due to the sanctions imposed on Iran to push it to curb its nuclear program. However, there are no indications so far that the international powers and the Iranian authorities are close to achieving a breakthrough in the negotiations aimed at reviving the 2015 nuclear deal.

Ali Fathallah Nejad, an Iranian affairs expert at the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs and the American University of Beirut, said, "The current security crackdown is closely linked to the escalation of protests in Iran."

He pointed out that the protests that took place across the country in December 2017 and November 2019 left their mark on the Iranian leadership. While it was primarily driven by social and economic conditions, it "soon turned political and targeted the entire (ruling) establishment."

"The popular demonstrations still pose a threat to the regime's stability," he told AFP.

The significant increase in the number of executions was remarkable, as Iran executed twice as many people in the first half of 2022 as it executed in the previous year, according to Iran Human Rights, a non-governmental organization based in Norway. The organization recorded 318 executions by hanging this year.

Amnesty International said that Iran is witnessing an "execution spree", as hangings are now proceeding at a "terrifying pace".

The Organization of Human Rights in Iran stated that the executions included ten women, three of whom were hanged in one day on July 27 after they were convicted of killing their husbands.

Meanwhile, Iran has also resumed cutting off the fingers of prisoners convicted of theft. Since May, at least two people have been subjected to this punishment, carried out with a specially designed guillotine in Evin Prison in Tehran, according to Amnesty.

On July 23, Iran carried out its first public execution in two years.

"The authorities are using large-scale executions to spread fear in society to prevent any new anti-government demonstrations," said Mahmoud Amiri Moghadam, director of Human Rights in Iran.

A growing movement inside and outside Iran uses the hashtag #edam_nakon, meaning "stop the execution", calling for an end to the use of the death penalty in the Islamic Republic, which executes more people annually than any country in the world except China.

Director Muhammad Rasoul Af was among the most prominent figures calling for stopping the executions. His poignant anti-death penalty film "The Devil Does Not Exist" won the Golden Bear at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival.

However, the arrest of Rasoul Af was stopped in early July after he published, with a group of directors and actors, an open letter in late May urging the security forces to lay down their weapons "in the face of the protests."

And then the director, who won several international awards, Jaafar Panahi, who remained for years unable to leave Iran, was arrested when he went two days later to ask about the whereabouts of Rasoul Af and was told that he had to serve a six-year prison sentence previously issued against him.

They join other well-known dissidents behind bars, including human rights activist Narges Mohammadi, who rights groups fear is at risk due to health problems that prison authorities have failed to treat properly.

Likewise, the security campaign witnessed the arrest of a number of relatives of victims of the authorities’ violent repression of the November 2019 demonstrations, who called for justice for their family members.

"There is no reason to believe that the arrests are more than insidious steps to deter public anger at the government's widespread failures," said Tara Sepehrifar, Iran researcher at Human Rights Watch, accusing the government of resorting to its "spontaneous repressive response to arrests." known opponents.

The past two months have also seen arrests of Baha'is, as part of what the international Baha'i community has described as "an escalating crisis in the Iranian government's systematic campaign" against the country's largest non-Muslim minority.

More than 20 foreign nationals or dual nationals remain under house arrest or stuck in Iran, according to the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran, as part of a policy their families describe as hostage-taking aimed at extracting concessions from the West.

In July, Iran allowed German-Iranian citizen Nahid Taqawi to leave prison for treatment and released American-British-Iranian citizen Morad Tahbaz with an electronic ankle bracelet. But they are still not allowed to leave Iran, while a Polish and a Belgian citizen, as well as a Swede and two French nationals, are also imprisoned.

Among those imprisoned is German citizen Jamshid Sharmahd, who, according to his family, was kidnapped in the Gulf in July 2020 and now faces the death penalty in a trial that is expected to conclude in the coming weeks.

"This is a fabricated operation aimed at persecuting dissidents and journalists who use freedom of expression in the free world... Allowing this to happen is outrageous," his daughter, Ghazal Sharmahd, told AFP.